Éloi Laurent

On his book Measuring Tomorrow: Accounting for Well-Being, Resilience, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

Cover Interview of January 28, 2018

The wide angle

Measuring Tomorrow
is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as
such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful
historical accounts of GDP’s ascent, we also need to take stock of existing
alternatives in a forward-looking way. By the same token, we have plenty of pointed
critiques of GDP but need to address the limitations of the alternative indicators
to growth. Dozens of the latter are created or updated each year, such as the Social Progress Index (SPI) or the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) but their conceptual and
empirical foundations are often obscure or sometimes weak. (What exactly do
they measure? How well do they measure it?) This book is not only a (necessarily
partial) guide to alternative indicators, but a guide to understanding their meaning,
accuracy, and usefulness.

Measuring Tomorrow
also attempts to grasp these alternative indicators’ plurality in an as-yet
missing consistent framework so that we can better understand the continuum
among well-being, resilience, and sustainability. Because this framework breaks
down well-being and sustainability into a limited number of fundamental
dimensions, it does not impose one best indicator on readers, but rather
invites them to select and even design those that matter the most for them. This
book also intends to convince readers, within this framework, that advances in
human well-being are fully compatible with environmental sustainability and even
that the two are, or at least can be, mutually reinforcing. In doing so, it
counters the beliefs that there is an unsurmountable trade-off between
well-being and sustainability, that sustainability can exist without
well-being, and that well-being does not need to be sustainable. Well-being
represents the many dimensions of human development (or, in a more poetic view,
human flourishing). Resilience represents well-being under shocks. Sustainability
represents dynamic well-being. Linking these three dimensions is an operational
way to acknowledge the continuity or non-dichotomy between humans and their natural
environment, or, in the words of French social psychologist and environmental
pioneer Serge Moscovici, the fact that “almost all of the natural world is now
human while humans have always been natural.”

Finally, I try to show throughout the book how
metrics can change policy. Well-being and sustainability indicators now need to
become performative and not just descriptive. While we should be concerned
about obsessive quantification, blind monetization, and hazardous
commodification, building, disseminating, and using alternative indicators is a
practical way to reclaim essential values and advance important issues. Done
properly, measuring produces positive social meaning. But we should not shy
away from the ethical questions posed by valuation: Can we measure everything?
Should we?

I was trained as a macroeconomist and realized
ten years ago that economics, the small human household, was contained in and
fully depended on the larger household of the biosphere, so that measuring
economic realities in a narrow and isolated way made little sense. This book is
a testimony to how much my vision of economics has changed in the last decade,
especially through teaching.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011